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Today starts my first Adventures in Missions training camp as a staff member. Today, 250 young people converge on a college campus to begin preparing their hearts and their minds to launch as missionaries to the nations. Sixty of them are college students who will go on a nine month trip called Passport: Immersion. And get this – I’m in charge of them. For training camp as well as the whole time they’re on the field. It’s crazy. And exciting. And exactly what I’ve been looking forward to.

As I type this I’m watching car fulls world racers and passporters roll up. They are decked out head to toe in their squad’s color – either red, orange, blue, green or purple. Their packs stuffed to the brim with everything they might need, and the look in their eyes is one that I love seeing… a little uncertain, but full of excitement, expectation, and most of all… hope.

I love this day – the first day of training camp. There is an awareness that is swirling in the air – something tangible that speaks of the new season that is about to break open for these people. And everyone here who has gone before them knows that once that season begins, nothing will ever be the same.

It seems especially fitting because the same thing is swirling in my life. The same excitement, a tiny bit of uncertainty, abundant expectation and most of all… hope. Lots of hope.

If fact, as this new season begins, the Lord has asked me not just to hope, but to dust off my highest hopes. To pull them back off of the shelf that I put them on and open them up and live in the middle of them.

And so that’s what I’m doing.

And this week, training camp offers me the perfect setting to live in the hope. Surrounded by 250 people who are leaking it everywhere, how can I not?